HI 148 - Improve Your Business with Marketing with Casey Stubbs

Welcome to the Heroic Investing Show. As first responders, we risk our lives every day. Our financial security is under attack. Our pensions are in a state of emergency. A single on duty incident can alter or erase our earning potential instantly and forever. We are the heroes of society. We are self reliant and we need to take care of our own financial future. The Heroic Investing show is our toolkit of business and investing tactics on our mission to financial freedom.

Hello everyone, and welcome to episode 148,148 of the Heroic Investing Show. So today I have an awesome interview with a gentleman who hails from up in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area. It's Mr. Casey Stubbs. And Casey, you can find out more about him@caseystubs.com C A S E Y S T U B B S so Casey is a Army veteran, U.S. army veteran. So that qualifies for him for being on Heroic Investing podcast, as would anyone who is a firefighter, you know, emt, first responder. So, you know, what we do on this show is we help individuals, we help heroes, like all of those mentioned before, to find time in their own world. So get some passive income so that they can focus on that unique genius that they can bring to the world, something that they know they're really good at, that others have said, wow, you're amazing at that, you should do more of it, you should sell that, or you should teach people that, but you just don't have the methods in place to do it. And becoming an entrepreneur perhaps is a little bit daunting. And you don't have anyone out there who could be a good role model to teach you how to do that, how to run that small business. So one of the things we try to do here is bring examples of individuals from this group of first responders and military and veterans that have done so, and that can help you out. And Casey is absolutely one of those people. So my name is Gary Pinkerton and I hope you really enjoy this show. A little bit about Casey. So, as I mentioned, a US army veteran, he's also an entrepreneur. He's dedicated to helping people from all walks of life achieve financial freedom and abundance in their lives. So back in 2009, he launched his first trading business, which generated over $6 million in revenue before being acquired by someone else. And since then, he has turned to kind of helping people market their business. And he loves helping investors. He loves helping people who like to trade on the stock market. That's not necessarily my gig or a lot of the listeners to this show. But he also likes to help veterans and help them market their business and get their business up and running. And I can tell you from personal experience that marketing is what keeps the wheels turning. And it is the thing getting out there, either personally doing it or. Or leveraging the web, leveraging emails and podcasts and all other sources of media today is what keeps things rolling. And having a professional help you will get you back that one scarce resource that you have in life, and that's time, right? Time's the only thing we can't do. If we spend money on the wrong advertising gig, the wrong virtual assistant, the wrong education course, you can go get it back, but you can't get back time. And so many of us have spent a large portion of our lives in service to other individuals, other people, the world. And now we want to try to 10x that, right? We want to take our own unique idea, our own service, our own product, and share that with the world on a big scale. So because we're a little bit behind, we're not starting this in our twenties. It really is helpful to have somebody to help you with the marketing side, somebody who has successfully done it with multiple businesses. So after his company was acquired, Casey went on to create several other companies. But the one where his passion really lies is helping people market their business, helping people bring their business to the next level. You know, Casey really told me he really loves if he can tie into that. The fact that this person is an American hero out there, helping them continue to improve the lives of others really gets him going. So I think you'll really enjoy this conversation with Casey Stubbs. I had the pleasure of being on Casey's show and I will announce that for you listeners once, once we have that nailed down. So this show, I think is planned to run on Wednesday, which is the 19th of September, and if that all works out correctly, it'll be the day before Patrick Ganaho's Paradigm Life's Cash Flow Wealth Summit. And I have the unique pleasure of being on there with a very close friend, Aaron Chapman, who is a mortgage broker. He's a lending provider. And he's also an amazing guy who sees himself as the CFO for your company, chief financial officer for your company, which is your real estate and your other passive income sources. And he has done tremendous things for my life. I've done about 18 loans through him at this point. And also is Jason Hartman. I think he opens up day one on Thursday the 20th. So please do get by there and see those 20 or so amazing individuals that are going to talk to you about how to improve passive income, how to improve cash flow in your life. And it's not all about real estate rental property, passive income. There's many other sources. In the past, we've talked about royalties, like royalty Exchange, talked about other kinds of revenue and royalties, and just how to do passive income from other kinds of real estate other than just single family homes that Jason and I focus on. So please do get over there. I think you're really going to enjoy this. And in the past, I can't guarantee it this year, but in the past, Patrick Donahoe has allowed people who attended to have like 30 days of access to the previous three years. This is the fourth anniversary of this and there's some great ones in there from Kiyosaki's, from his advisors, from many other people. So please do jump out there if you hear this afterwards. No worry, we'll figure out a way to get you there. Just reach out to me@garyarypinkerton.com GaryPinkerton.com with that, let's go hang out with Casey Stubbs and let's learn something about how to improve our business through marketing. Thank you.

Foreign.

Welcome back and thanks again for joining me for this episode of Heroic Investing. As I mentioned in the introduction, we have with us an incredible guest, Casey Stubbs. And Casey is an army veteran. I'll let him talk about the details there. It's a great and storied past, but actually it's not focused exclusively on Iraq and Afghanistan, which has been the, the case somewhat more recently in my, in the individuals I've had conversations with. Casey is someone who has built a business. And the good news is he started more than four years ago, so the startup phase is behind him and he's starting to reap the benefits of it. I think it's extremely exciting to see what he's done, what he's learned and, you know, with his marketing business, but also the advice he has for all of us. So, Casey, thank you so much for spending some time with us and sharing your wisdom and your lessons learned with our audience.

Thank you for having me on the show, Gary. Very excited to be here.

Awesome. So another thing you'll hear very quickly is that Casey has awesome acoustics because Casey runs his own podcast. So don't forget to mention that at some point. And Casey, please tell us how you got here, how you, how you ended up with this business and what your military past looked like.

Okay, well, I'll start with the military past and then roll into how I went into business. So I started right out of high school, got into the army because, well, not exactly immediately. I first went to college for about one semester and realized that this was the worst experience ever. I didn't really want to go, but I didn't know what to do. So I ended up running into a recruiter in the hallway and was just really glad to be able to get out of college. Went to college for a little bit, then I joined the army, went to Germany, did a deployment to Bosnia and then a deployment to Kosovo. And after that I did another deployment to Iraq. So total of three deployments in the military. Got out in 2005. And after that I did a little bit of construction and the construction industry went down in 2008, 2009, as I'm sure you're aware, with the big economy drop, a lot of people had investment losses, but also the construction industry really took a big hit. So I lost my job and I just started my website on the side just for something to do, talking about my hobbies and investing, and ended up turning that website into a business. I was on unemployment and by the time I ran out of unemployment, I was making enough money to make that my full time job.

You chose to, as you said, very computer savvy, very interested in computer, so you chose marketing, but in the financial services industry and specifically to leverage your experience and your interest in the world of trading. So you help traders earn more money faster to improve their craft. Do I have that right?

Well, it's close. I don't help them improve their craft. I help them sell their products.

Okay.

But it does help them improve their craft because they don't have to focus on the marketing. I do this primarily for the financial industry, but it works with any industry. If you have a business, there's really two sides to the business. There's your service that you provide. You know, if you're a doctor or you own a doctor's office or a dentist, you know, you have to get clients, you have to get patients. So you want to be an expert dentist and study teeth and learn everything you need to do about getting your skills down. You don't really want to focus on marketing, on everything that you need to learn in order to get new clients or patients. So that's where I come in. I help them with their marketing. And I didn't really choose to become a marketer. It just kind of happened. I started the website and realized through the traffic that came that I could use that to earn Revenue. I didn't really know what I was doing when I started. It just I learned along the way and I'm still here now.

You know, so many people I talked to about how they ended up in their business got there that way. It was not intentional. What happened was that's where they were being compensated because they had stumbled across a need that the world had. And in a real free economy, you get compensated because you're filling somebody a need that somebody has. And so you just end up. That becomes your business. And it sounds very similar to yours. So I tried trading as the rookie trader back, you know, in the dot com era. Went in late. As you know, there's this really funny phrase in business that's often repeated that goes something like when two people meet and one has money and the other has knowledge and experience, quickly the individual with the knowledge and experience has all the money. And the individual who used to have money now has a lot of experience. And so that's my experience in the trading world and I've pretty much gone to real estate since then and got my experience a little bit slower, but I still got a bunch of experience that way with lessons learned and mistakes. I guess my question is in the world of trading and you're helping them with marketing, so, you know, a lot of this experience is learned on how to do their craft. But once they have a little experience, they have to be able to leverage it to start the cash flow coming. That is really where you're again to go away a little bit, I guess, from traders. It's really just about helping people reach the appropriate audience with their product or their service.

Right, exactly. So yes, I'm doing that in the trading industry, but it really could be applied for anyone. And so I'm thinking particularly of the listeners here that may be working a job, like you said, first responders, military, active duty or veterans, somebody that is currently working and they're looking for side revenue. They could take a skill that they know and then use that to start a secondary business. If and perhaps launch a website, use that to help educate others based on maybe some of their hobbies or skill sets that they have that they would rather work. And you can do it part time as well while working a job.

Casey, you hail from the Pittsburgh area and I'm assuming you're working a lot with individuals on Wall Street.

Do you do most of your work.

Virtually with your clients?

I would say that I do a good bit of it virtual like on phone or video conference and email. And yeah, most of that happens. I do have a team here that works in my office, my team that is managing my products, managing my websites and things like that, people that are working with me. But most of my clients are outside the area, which is a great benefit for people that want to start their own business on the side right now because you can do that from anywhere. A great example is we have the Internet. You can travel and work and so it really doesn't matter where you're at. I, I take working vacations where, you know, I take my family. We go out all, we were gone like for a month this summer and my wife will be driving, I'll be sitting with the laptop and I can work while we're going across the country.

Yeah, my business as the listeners know is the same. You know, I'm in the financial services industry as well, typically insurance based, non market integrated. But I do the same thing. I meet with all my clients over the Internet, virtually through video conferencing, as does my co host, Jason Hartman. He sells real estate or lines up clients or investors with individuals in local markets that have products. He does that nationwide as well. So it's really becoming the way of the future. It's amazing how many people are still resistant to doing it or feel that their customers won't relate to them. And for me, it's not the client or the customer that has an issue. It's generally technology. But it's certainly not about trusting people. I think we're, my majority were past that. I mean, the ability to see someone on camera, you know, I think provides enough that you can become comfortable with the individual, that they're real.

Yeah, I agree. I think that it can be hard to adopt new technologies, especially for people that don't like to change and who really likes to change. It's a tough thing, but you don't want to get left behind either. And so I recommend that people really do their research. I feel like you see things change, you know, like when the Internet got adapted or smartphones, a lot of people, they're going, I don't need a smartphone, I don't, I don't have any need for it. I don't want to adapt to that. The Internet, I don't need that, I don't want to adapt to that. And we see it now with cryptocurrency. A lot of people are resistant to that and they think that it's not going anywhere, but they're going to miss opportunities. If you're not willing to embrace change, you're going to Miss opportunities. You're going to get stuck doing things the old ways. And that's a big thing in business. You got to be flexible and adapt with what's happening in the marketplace place.

Right to remain viable, right to not get ran over. What are some of your thoughts about early lessons you learned as you were growing your business or even starting it?

I think the biggest thing that I've learned that I try to apply to this day is don't look at what you want or what you don't have. Look at what you do have and be thankful that you have that. Because when I first got started, I would say, well, if I had a budget, a marketing budget, I could do this. Or, you know, if I had somebody to help me out, I'd be able to do these things. And that was really a stumbling block for me. And what I realized was, wait a second, I do have some resources that I can use, and instead of focusing on what I don't have, let's focus on what I do have and start employing that. So I would say that anyone who is looking to do anything, just take a look at what you have, because I guarantee you might not have a lot, but I guarantee that you do have something, right? So when I started, I didn't have any money, have a job, but I did have a really old computer and a slow Internet connection. And I took those two things and I turned it into a business. And I even had to like my website that I started. I used a free web builder, it's called Yola, right, where they give you a website for free. So I didn't pay for my website, my email, because I was building an email list to do marketing. I used a free email service that gave me free emails up to a certain point. So I didn't use any expenses. And I just took the limited resources I had and I took those and I grew them to the next level. And I still do that now. I'm always looking at, okay, what can I employ? What am I missing? Because I know I got some value here somewhere.

That's awesome advice. I didn't expect that to be your first or your biggest recommendation, but that is pretty awesome stuff. I'm in a program that Dan Sullivan puts on for personal development and business development called Strategic Coach. And he calls what you just talked about as being not focusing in the gap or not getting stuck in the gap. And that's the gap between where you currently are and where you had just set your mind, heart and soul that you were going to be at some point in time, and focusing always on that is kind of one of those diminishing returns. You never actually get there because you will move the mark in the future. Once you get near it, you're preventing yourself, your psychology, from getting that satisfaction, the win that is very helpful in keeping startup businesses going. Rather, if you focus on, like you said, what you currently have or the distance that you have traveled, it's kind of like living your business and looking in the rearview mirror, like, what milestones have I crossed? And, you know, how amazing is that? That I've done so much better than last year or did things faster or more efficiently or with better clients or whatever it is. Focus on, like you said, what you have achieved, not the fact that you're not yet at the goal or you're a few dollars behind where you were supposed to be this month. I've fallen in that trap. I continually fall into that trap, and Dan Sullivan says he does, too. You can get out of it quicker, though, when you recognize what you're doing.

I think, yeah, I think those of us that are very ambitious have a really. The ability to fall into that because we want so much. So I've got big goals and I'm always looking ahead. And my wife will remind me, she says, can you for once stop thinking about the future and think about what's happening right now? And so then when she says that, I said, oh, yeah, you're right.

That's sorry. That is awesome advice. We'll dream away, you know, our kids. And I have a very close friend who, Jim Shields, who runs a organization called Family Board Meetings. And he's coined this phrase, maybe patented it or trademarked it, I'm not sure, but about 18 summers, and it's just a reminder that some members of your family that are there for a short time, your children, you only have 18 summers and make a huge impact. And if you're always focusing on the future, those things fly by. I know this from sobering experience. My kids are 14 and almost 17, and I'm scrambling with, you know, with time in the military and giving up a few that I didn't have a lot of choice about scrambling now to try to make those count. But I still find myself doing exactly what you just said. You know, this summer has blown by and I've only done one trip, so I'm trying to scramble and get another trip in before they go back to school with the kids to get some memories. It's just amazing how quickly those of us that are type A personality Overachievers, which is basically everyone who was in the military and first responders. How quickly we get just caught up in trying to move the ball.

Yeah, that's a great lesson, is to try to really enjoy the moment and not focus too much on objectives. Because not everything in life is about objectives. It's about enjoying the journey while you're accomplishing those objectives. So enjoy the time and yeah, I agree. I took a nice long vacation with my family. I actually have nine kids, by the way, which is a unique thing that.

You have more than total then.

Yeah, My oldest are just graduating now high school, and my youngest is five. And so we have a lot of fun together in the summer.

Awesome. You mentioned that you didn't have a lot of fun in college, but I think you've been back. Did you go back for education after you left the Army?

I did a little bit. I ended up getting my associate's degree. And so I can't totally dismiss it. I don't like to admit to it, but I did actually do that. I just did it online through a local community college. Yeah, so I did go back to school.

Yeah. And I went a total other path a couple years older than you. And I just go to go to school, get a good job, you know, and work for one company your whole life. Or for me it was the military. But, you know, I've been an entrepreneur at heart and kind of wish I hadn't taken that path. But I was a little scared that the alternatives were not pretty, growing up poor in the Midwest. So I won't justify my actions, but I kind of. I envy my oldest son, actually, is where I should go in that he's very, what I want to say, balanced about this idea of college, like he will do it to an extent, like yourself, if it makes sense. But he's not going to go just because his buddies are and he's not going to build up a big debt. So I'm really proud of him for making that approach. And certainly it wasn't coming from my example because I was totally into get more degrees, get more stuff after your name. Have kind of learned from my ways. But I love the approach of balance that you and my son are considering doing.

Yeah, I think it's pretty smart nowadays because going in with a big debt is not a real smart thing to do. It's terrible to start your life with such a big hill to climb. We got enough hills to climb as it is. But I do love learning, you know, I think that's one of the things about entrepreneurs is they might not like school, but they find out that they love learning. I study and read and reading is my favorite thing to do and just learning the stuff that I want, not what my teachers are telling me.

Exactly, exactly. We don't hate learning. We hate, you know, studying things that we see no, no value in studying. Kiyosaki talks about that all the time, about beating up his teachers and getting in trouble because he didn't understand how that was going to add value.

Yeah. And I'm sure you've probably talked about his book Rich Dad, Poor Dad. That's like one of my favorite books. I've read that a couple times, and it's just so fantastic. The mindset about being an entrepreneur versus getting security from a job is huge. I think that's another big takeaway for people. It's just don't always be settling for working for a paycheck, you know?

Yeah, he's got a lot of great books. I've met the man numerous times. Certainly a hero of mine, you know, being so involved with real estate, being a veteran, a Marine who's had combat time in Vietnam. One of his more controversial books has a great title. It's why A Students Work for C Students and B Students Work for the Government. And it wasn't necessarily his bestseller, but being a B student that worked for the government for many years, he kind of hit a little bit close to home. I think, though, it kind of speaks to a little bit of a trap that you can get into if you just follow without really questioning why you're studying, what you're studying. You get yourself caught up, you know, with a lot of debt, like you said, and the A students find themselves needing to work for people who have other options. The reason the C students own businesses is because maybe they didn't stick with school or they don't have the debt, so they have the ability to, you know, kind of launch out there and do it. And that's what I want, for all my listeners, is I'm not saying you have to quit early. You can go 30 years like I did, but you want to have the option to always do it so that when you are sticking with your company or with the military or whatever it is, you're doing it on your.

Your terms.

Life is so much better when it's. When that's the situation, as opposed to, I hate this, but I don't have any choice because, you know, I have lots of debts.

Right. And I think just I'll put a little Disclaimer here. You really should take evaluation of your own personality, because I think being an entrepreneur has to do with traits that are wired into you that you don't really have any control over. Like, you were just born with it. Like, I can't explain why I am the way that I am. It's just I've always been that way, and it's who I am. Like, I was talking to somebody else about confidence. Right. I have a really crazy confidence level that I believe that I can do whatever I want to do if I just set my mind to it. And there's really no. It's totally illogical because it's like something that I've never done before, and there's no track record, and there's no reason to believe that I can do it. Yet in my mind, I think I can. And that illogical confidence that doesn't really even make any sense always helps me push through, even though the odds are always against me. And usually I'm taking failure after failure, but I still think I can do this thing.

Yeah, well, you know, I think that is entrepreneurship, no doubt. That certainly is a trait that would really help an entrepreneur. I'm hoping that our audience will select out and stop listening if this doesn't speak to them. Great point, though, that you should certainly listen to yourself and not just launch head on in here, because it sounded like entrepreneurship was talked about by this guy who's running a podcast as being better than the alternative. Because there's a lot of people that, you know, that's why the term entrepreneur is starting to become popular, because a lot of people thrive running somebody else's business, and they absolutely kill it doing it, and that's where they should be. If that's true. Those who want, you know, the opportunity to have no ceiling be able to be compensated for however much value to add, whether that's 100,000 or 10 million, then you know, you probably need to be running your own business or be an entrepreneur in some sort. So now you've got this. This business that's growing. It's running well. It's in kind of a. I would call the teenager years of a business, maybe even adulthood. How are things different now?

I would say at the phase that I'm at right now, I'm pretty comfortable because I did really well right out of the gates, made a lot of revenue and did well, but then I hit a really difficult period. So I ended up having, like, 10 people working for me and made a lot of money, and then I hit A downturn things went against me. I lost every single person that was working with me till I was back to myself. I had three down years in a row. So once you start making this upward momentum and then that turns, it's really hard to turn it back up again because you start cutting everything and start slashing everything and it's just really tough. So I was able to survive the downturn and now back up to new highs. So I did a three year downturn and then I started to turn it up and now I'm making new highs. So it's a really good place to be. But it's a really important growing stage in my life, I believe because in order to go to the next level, which is really my desire, I'm going to have to make a lot of changes, right? Because I'm a go getter, I can get things done, but now I have to learn how to duplicate myself, how to stop doing things and rather getting people to do things, how to delegate, how to trust my team, how to step back and not participate in everything. Because now I find that the biggest growth bottleneck is myself because I say, okay, I'll do this and I don't realize that I'm too busy and I can't do it and. And then my team ends up saying like, okay, you need to do this and I don't. And so I've got to get to the point where I just to grow, I have to change.

Basically, yeah, I'm in some of the very similar things. So I've taken on a coach, I've taken on, I've joined a kind of a business development program. What would be your advice? What things have you done or plan to do?

The way that I change is I'm reading a lot, I'm doing the same thing. I've had a coach, I'm not working with a coach right now. I'm in two high level mastermind groups of business owners that are above me, either equal or above me, that I can interact with and learn from and just build friendships with. The way that I approach business is it's all about building relationships and friends, right? So I meet people that I like and I continue to do business with them and I make money with them, you know, and so it's a really great scenario. You build friends and make money at the same time. And when you have that philosophy, if a deal works out and you make money, great. If not, it doesn't really matter because it's not really about the money anyways. I mean the money is kind of like a side benefit.

Yeah. Awesome. Well, I think you've done that here. I think you've met a friend, hopefully. So as far as on the education side, I know that you have some education platforms that you use for personal education, for financial education, and in general, just have a website where your wisdom and assistance for others is located. So can you give us a little bit about some resources there?

The biggest resource for your listeners would be my podcast, which is called the Cash Flow Hacking Podcast. And you can get access to that either by googling it, the Cash Flow Hacking Podcast, or going to my website, caseystubs.com and my podcast is listed there. And I go over, I bring in experts, kind of like yourself, of people that have strategies on how to increase their cash flow, how to grow their revenues. And I think that's something that most people are interested in. And so I'll just give a little background on the show. I started it in March of this year, and since I'm a marketer, my strategy was I'm going to start it so I can get a lot of traffic, because I went to a marketing conference called the Traffic and Conversion Summit in San Diego. It's a great marketing conference, if anybody's into marketing. And the big takeaway was podcasts is the way to go. And so I'm like, whenever I do something, here's another lesson built in. Whenever I take an education or I do any kind of learning, I make a requirement of myself that I take at least one action step, because if I'm going to pay money for some mentoring or something and I don't do it, it's a total waste. So my action step from the conference was to start a podcast. And to make a long story short, the purpose was for traffic. But what ended up happening was I ended up educating myself by bringing in really smart people onto the show. And so it's so wonderful that I can learn all of this material by bringing in these great people. So I'm actually applying things that my guests are teaching me. One guest taught me how to launch a book in 21 days, and I'm like, oh, I got to do this? And so I actually went ahead and did exactly what he said. And my book is going to be launched in probably a week or so. So the point is just that it's been such a benefit to me personally and to my listeners because I just learned so much great stuff from the show. And you probably have experienced some stuff like that as well.

Yeah, you learn a tremendous amount. When you focus on others and trying to provide content, you have guests who come on who are doing the same thing and it's just a very kind of open give, give environment. Certainly I have learned a tremendous amount from you and from everyone else who's been on the show. Speaking of that, we're kind of coming to the end. So other than your podcast, how about your website? Are there other places they should go?

Caseystubs.com is pretty much the main one. You can connect with me on social if you want to connect with me personally. Twitter is a great place. I'm really active on there. I'm tweeting every day, putting out some tips and tricks and just connecting with people. I meet a lot of great people on there. So you just search for Casey Stubbs on Twitter if you want to connect with me personally.

That's awesome. Casey. Thanks so much for spending some time with our audience.

Thanks for having me, Gary. This has been great.

Thank you so much for listening. Please be sure to subscribe so that you don't miss any episodes. Be sure to check out this show's specific website and our general website, hartmanmedia.com for appropriate disclaimers and terms of service. Remember that guest opinions are their own and if you require specific legal or tax advice or advice in any other specialized area, please consult an appropriate professional. And we also very much appreciate you reviewing the show. Please go to iTunes or Stitcher Radio or whatever platform you're using and write a review for the show. We would very much appreciate that and be sure to make it official and subscribe so you do not miss any episodes. We look forward to seeing you on the next episode.